Credit: Jacques Rolland, Le Moniteur.

The right machine, in the right place, at the right time

How can you optimise the use of your work site equipment? A scalable mobile application helps dispatchers.

Accessible from tablets and smartphones, Dispatcher can provide savings of 10 to 15% on work site machine management.

The ability to reduce your equipment costs with just a few clicks, without having to change your machine fleet, is the helping hand created by Julien Fournier and Maxime Guesné, two Supélec engineers, for the role of dispatcher. Responsible for coordinating and optimising work site resources, dispatchers are still often required to work with a telephone, fax machine, and spreadsheets. Thanks to the Dispatcher application developed by the duo, they will be able to streamline and speed up rotations, and to deploy underused resources via a standard smartphone.

“At a time of tight budgets and a need for rapid return on investment, having the right logistics in the right place at the right time is of strategic importance,” emphasises Julien Fournier. “The use of appropriate digital tools thus becomes essential to make the best use of your equipment in the field,” adds Maxime Guesné. It took a year to design and test the app. Accessible online, via tablets or connected or unconnected smartphones, it uses data hosted in the Cloud. The equipment management function is already available to download, at a price ranging from 15 to 50 euros per month, per user.

Time-consuming set-up

The first company to test it, SPAC (a subsidiary of the Colas group) expressed their satisfaction: while machinery generally accounts for one fifth of the cost of a work site, they noted savings of 10% to 15% on this expense. This may not seem much, but it allows works supervisors and dispatchers to avoid hiring a vehicle when there is one available on a nearby site, since the system also compares the costs required for a transfer against those of a rental company. Other companies with large fleets, such as GTM Bâtiment, Cardem/Eurovia (Vinci group), or the Italian company Impresa Bianchi, have already adopted Dispatcher.

However, as one of the works supervisors testing the application pointed out, its operational implementation requires time and energy. After all, in order for it to be effective, it is necessary to enter a large amount of data on the characteristics and location of the company’s machines and those of the listed rental companies, their availability, and their hourly cost, consumption, transfer charges, etc. The management dashboards are therefore refined during use.

Building on this success, Julien Fournier and Maxime Guesné have created an additional function for managing human resources, particularly for machine operators. In the longer term, they are already working on a planning system for the supply of materials, the third largest expense on work sites.

Dispatcher has boosted the organisation of a number of companies, going well beyond their pre-defined objectives.

👉 Find out more about planning : Dispatcher planning tool. 

Article published by Le Moniteur on 01/02/2017 at 12.14 p.m.

Dispatcher press release,

03/02/2017.